My Piece Of The Pie

Callous bankers, doughty workers fighting the ills of unemployment, a love story across the industrial divide, an upbeat ending — Cedric Klapisch's My Piece of the Pie is an English-style social comedy with every chance of becoming a crowd-pleaser. Though it wears its commitment on its sleeve, the movie is in tune with the times and should find a receptive audience wherever the current financial crisis has left blood on the shop floor.

The two main characters are emblematic. When her employer goes bust, a victim of the financial crash, France (Karin Viard), the mother of three adolescent daughters, starts commuting from the port city of Dunkirk where she lives to Paris where she is able find temporary jobs through a home-help agency. Meanwhile in London, Steve (Gilles Lellouche) — birth-name Stephane — is rewarded for his success as a high-flying trader with a mission to set up a new hedge fund in Paris.

France soon finds herself house-cleaning in Steve's luxury penthouse. Her duties are then extended to baby-sitting for Albin, the son Steve had with his estranged partner Melody (Raphaele Godin). Inevitably, a romantic entanglement follows. With an improbable idyll about to bloom, Steve lets slip a boast that it was he more than anyone who sank the firm France used to work for and consigned her and her fellow workers to the dole queue.

Read the full review in Hollywood Reporter